Ladhood

For all the novel's examination of the more negative aspects of male bonding, however, James Campbell detects more commonly an assertion of the New Lad image which has spawned so many men's magazines, television programmes and cultural forums from the 1990s onwards: 'Glue has an epic scale; it charts the rites of passage from boyhood to ladhood (no Welsh character has progressed beyond the latter)'.

Like a father he raised me from ladhood, And pleasant his presence made all.